Cheap Grace and Godly Fear
Author: Andrew Comiskey
April 04, 2022
‘In You there is
forgiveness, so You are to be feared’ (Psalm 130:4).
‘The purpose of Lent…is to
create a healthy hatred of evil, a heartfelt contrition for sin, and a
passionately felt need for grace.’ Edna Hong
Anyone for whom ‘the grace
of God has appeared’ (Titus 2:11) is seized at once by his darkness and the
Light of love that surrounds and dispels it. In gratitude we cling, like the
sinful woman in Luke 7 who suffered a Pharisaic fool just to worship at the feet
of Jesus.
Holy love demagnetizes our
demons and draws us into devotion. We cleave to the Divine, dread life without
Him, and fear the sin that could still separate us from Him and our better
selves.
Grace reveals sin’s crater
so that mercy might flood and fill us like a lake, pure, of unfathomable depth.
Maybe that’s why the Gospels feature repentant sexual sinners as trophies of
grace. In the turbulent, often troubled waters of our passions, ‘those forgiven
of much love Him much’ (Lk. 7:47).
Sadly, Christians are
inclined these days to extend a banner of fake ‘grace’ to cover perceived damage
done to sexual sinners. Jessica Chastain just won an Oscar (you probably didn’t
notice after the Will Smith follies) for channeling Tammy Faye Baker, an eighties
Christian TV host known in her later years for championing ‘gay’ men. In her
acceptance speech, Chastain rambled on the danger of rainbow suicidality and
legislation threatening ‘LGBTQ+’ everything. Neither Jessica nor her muse Tammy
touched the distress at core of persons broken by sexual confusion. Celebrity gloss
can’t stifle the cry for mercy. Persons instinctively plead for release from
sexual disorder, not the embrace of it.
Wolves cloaked in grace sank
Exodus International (the network of ministries like DSM that championed Jesus’
answer to the cry of same-sex strugglers). Alan Chambers, Exodus’ last
president, and his pastor Clark Whitten welcomed a wave of ‘hyper-grace’ that
lulled Exodus into sweet passivity; in their paradigm, Jesus does all (personal
responsibility may be ‘legalism’) and unites all who claim ‘faith’ into a ‘once
saved always saved’ fantasy land.
Buoyed by cheap grace, Alan
began dialoging with persons (ex-ex-gays?!?) who claimed to have been abused by
Exodus’ call to repentance. He went on national TV and repented of the call to
repentance. He cozied up to a group of practicing ‘gay’ Christians on the basis
that ‘gay’ behavior and identification need not have eternal consequences. He
declared publicly that no-one really changed. Alan thinks he shut down Exodus
in 2012. I think God did. He spit Alan and company out for forfeiting the real
grace that could be theirs (Jonah 2:8).
‘How much more severely do
you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God
underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that
sanctified him, who has insulted the Spirit of grace’ (Heb. 10:29)?
Real grace commands
repentance. The servant is not greater than his master. He who lives under the
Cross dies a public death to his old self then gratefully follows the Lamb
wherever He goes. The Cross alone leads to life. Grace assumes its true form in
the Crucified, and in disciples who carry their crosses within His shelter.
‘There are many Christians
who kneel before the Cross of Jesus, and yet reject every struggle in their
lives. They believe they love the Cross but actually they hate that cross in
their own lives. And so they hate the Cross of Jesus as well, and in truth try
by any means possible to escape it.’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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